But the debate is just heating up. In a wide ranging interview
with Godin on the subject, his passion and enthusiastic support
for the shift from single point of distribution publishing to
web-wide curation took on the zeal of a manifesto.

"We don't have an information shortage, we have an attention
shortage" says Godin. "There's always someone who's going to
supply you with information that you're going to curate. The
Guggenheim doesn't have a shortage of art. They don't pay you to
hang painting for a show, in fact you have to pay for
the insurance. Why? Because the Guggenheim is doing a service to
the person who's in the museum and the artist who's being
displayed."

As Godin sees the world, power is shifting from content makers to
content curators -- and that's leaving folks like Cuban with less
power to dictate terms.

Godin explains: "if we live in a world where information drives
what we do, the information we get becomes the most important
thing. The person who chooses that information has power."

So, what about the vampire analogy? It's all wrong, Godin says:
"When a vampire sucks your blood, you make new blood. That's
different than when a human being eats bacon. The pig's over,
it's done. The thing about information is that information is
more valuable when people know it. There's an exception for
business information and super timely information, but in all
other cases, ideas that spread win. I'm not talking about
plagiarism, I'm talking about the difference between obscurity
and piracy. If the taking is so whole that the original is worth
nothing -- like eating bacon -- that's a problem."

"If Oprah calls you on the phone and says come be on my TV show
and tell everyone what's in your book, do you then say: 'How much
are you going to pay me?' Of course not, Oprah doesn't pay people
to be on her show. The chance to tell your story to Oprah's
viewership is priceless. In fact, you'd pay her."

"Is Oprah a Vampire? I don't think so."

In the world we're arriving in, Godin preaches the value of being
extraordinary -- and of being flexible about how you price and
value your service. Pricing is no longer 'one-size-fits-all'.

"In my latest book, Linchpin, I'm saying the industrial
revolution is over. This model that says you should do what your
told in a factory setting is over. Karl Marx and Adam Smith said
there are two teams, owners and workers. I'm saying there's a
third team now, people who own their own means of production.
They own the factory and they're a worker. That could be a
blogger, or a designer. The argument of the book is that the
linchpin is the one part that you can't live without. It's good
news because now you can be somebody who's going to step up and
people are going to notice."

So, what does that mean for mainstream publishers today? Folks
who have made their income and built their business in the
'pre-aggregation' economy? Is it possible to survive in media
without participating in the aggregation and curation economy?

"First, you have to cut your overhead to the bone. You can't have
a staff of people dedicated to selling stuff on the corner, and
then have the sales part go away, but keep the overhead part."

But are cost cuts enough? No, Godin says: "You'd have to be
amazing."

Cuban's advice to content creators: cut off the aggregators at
the knees. Throw the switch. Don't let your content be crawled or
curated.

Godin's response: "The default should be you opt in to
sharing. If you need to keep your book out of the library. If you
want to opt out of Google it's easy, it's a button. But even
Rupert Murdoch doesn't have the guts to do that because it would
mean ruin."

"The economics of the structure is curators, not curators with
buildings or newspapers but individuals are going to become ever
more important. We're not going to outgrow our need for
information."

From Godin's point of view, we need a middleman, a curator, to
help us find what's important. That's where the value lies. And
he says that person is a linchpin.

Steve Rosenbaum is founder and CEO of Magnify.net, a NYC-based Web video
startup. He has been building and growing consumer-content
businesses since 1992. He was the creator and Executive Producer
of MTV UNfiltered, a series that was the first commercial
application of user-generated video in commercial TV.